A scientific theory hasn’t really arrived until the cynical and unscrupulous find a way to use it to extract money from the credulous and gullible. This has posed a significant obstacle for general relativity, dealing as it does with gravity, which requires really gigantic masses to produce measurable effects. That makes it a little difficult to sell wacky general relativity-based schemes to people.

Until now, anyway– recent advances in atomic clocks have made it possible to see relativistic effects on a human scale. There was a really nice talk on this experiment in the fundamental symmetry session at DAMOP, and talking about it afterwards revealed a great get-rich-quick scheme using general relativity. It follows the time-honored strategy of tying dodgy science to health, and promising people that they can extend their lives through crank physics.

In this case, you can think of it as a sort of Bat Diet (no hyphen– this isn’t a superhero comic): you can exploit general relativity to extend your life by sleeping underground and upside down.

“How does that make any sense?,” you ask. Well, general relativity tells us that clocks that are lower down in a gravitational field “tick” more slowly than clocks at higher altitudes. So, when you’re standing upright, your brain is aging more rapidly than your feet, and when you’re in an office on an upper floor, you’re aging more rapidly than a person on the street below. In order to live longer, then, you want to stay at the lowest altitude possible, and if you care about the age of your brain, you want to keep it lower down. Thus, bats have the right idea: if you sleep upside down in an underground cave, you’re helping your brain age more slowly.

“That’s completely ridiculous,” you say. “Why would a clock care about the altitude?” The easiest way to understand it is by thinking about the Equivalence Principle, which tells us that the effects of gravity are indistinguishable from the effects of acceleration. The equivalence principle was the key insight that led Einstein to develop general relativity, extending his theory of special relativity from a simple description of motion to a complete theory of gravity.

The key insight for Einstein was the realization that an observer falling freely in a gravitational field would feel no force of gravity– everything else in their vicinity would fall at exactly the same rate, and thus appear to be floating in the air at rest. A dog sealed in an elevator, then, would be completely incapable of distinguishing between the case where the elevator was falling freely (say, because some dastardly cat cut the cable) and a case where the elevator was floating by itself off in outer space (say, because the dog was in a Roald Dahl novel). All the laws of physics must appear exactly the same to the dog in the free-falling elevator as in an elevator floating in space.

So, let’s think about a dog in a falling elevator shining a light from the top of the elevator to the bottom. She sees the light beam follow a straight-line path from top to bottom, and the beam hitting the floor is exactly the same color as the beam that left the ceiling. That’s what you would expect in an elevator at rest, and is just common sense.

This presents a problem for the cat outside the elevator, though, cackling maniacally while watching the dog fall. From the cat’s perspective, the floor of the elevator is accelerating downward, and when the light reaches the floor, the floor is moving away from the light at a higher speed than when it was emitted. This means that the light hitting the floor should be Doppler shifted to the red. But the dog doesn’t see the frequency change, and the cat has to agree that the dog sees the same frequency at both ends of the elevator. So, how do we reconcile these?

The solution to the problem is a gravitational frequency shift: According to the cat, the light must increase in frequency by an amount that exactly counters the Doppler shift due to the acceleration of the elevator. Light moving down in a gravitational field gets more blue as it falls, while light sent upward in a gravitational field gets more red. this “gravitational redshift” has been experimentally confirmed in a number of different experiments.

This still leaves a problem, though, namely that the shift must also occur when the source and the detector are not moving relative to one another. If a cat at the top of the elevator shaft shines a light down, a second cat at the bottom must see a higher frequency for the light coming down, and the top cat must see a lower frequency for the light coming up from the bottom. And yet, the cats aren’t moving relative to one another, and each sees his own source emitting the same frequency at all times. So how do we explain the shift in that situation?

In order to make everything work out right, we are forced to conclude that the rate at which time passes is different at different points in a gravitational field. The high-altitude cat looking down at his crony on the ground sees the lower cat’s clocks ticking more slowly. This explains not just why the light coming up is at a lower frequency (because the lower cat’s clock ticks too slowly, and he’s sending lower-than-expected frequencies up), but also why that cat sees the light coming down at a higher frequency (each “second” on his clock is a little more than one second according to the cat at the top, and thus include a few more oscillations of the light from the top cat’s source). And it can be turned around to explain the bottom cat’s results in terms of a too-fast clock for the top cat.

This gravitational time dilation is one of the strangest consequences of relativity, but it’s been confirmed in numerous experiments. The most sensitive test is the atomic-clock experiment mentioned above, which includes this graph showing a clear difference between the rates of two identical clocks when one of them was hoisted up by one foot:

This is also the prediction of general relativity with the most direct technological consequence: the atomic clocks orbiting the Earth as part of the Global Positioning System must be corrected for the effects of relativity, with the largest correction coming from the fact that the clocks are at high altitude. Without that correction, the GPS clocks would drift out of synch with clocks on the ground by almost 40 μs per day, which amounts to a position error of around 11 km/day. The current accuracy of GPS– my cell phone can get my position on the surface of the Earth to within several meters– is possible only because the engineers who designed the system built in a correction for the gravitational time dilation.

So, again, general relativity tells us that clocks that are lower down in a gravitational field tick more slowly than clocks at higher elevation. Which means that a person who spends their entire life at or a little below ground level will live longer than a person who spends a lot of time in tall buildings and airplanes. And also that your head ages slightly faster than your feet. Thus, the Bat Diet (which isn’t really a diet, but it’s a catchy name): if you spend your time underground and upside down, your brain will experience time moving more slowly than surface-based people standing upright.

How big an effect is this? Well, the difference near the surface of the Earth goes like the difference in height multiplied by the gravitational acceleration g=9.8m/s2, divided by the speed of light squared. Which means that for every meter of altitude you manage to lower yourself, on average, you’ll slow the rate of time by a bit less than 300 nanoseconds over an 80-year lifespan.

OK, fine, that’s not much of a difference. But then, the whole point of this sort of scam is to prey on people who are bad at math, so I bet you could still fool some people with more money than sense into constructing expensive subterranean dwellings, and shelling out big consulting fees for advice on the most relativistically appropriate way to live.

Of course, I’ve just given this idea away for free on the Internet. Hmmm… Maybe I need to rethink my business model…

While it is true that the gravitational field one experiences gets stronger as you approach the surface of a planet from above, once you go underground, it starts to get weaker; the mass above you cancels-out part of the gravitational pull of the mass below. Therefore, a clock buried deep within the earth will actually tick *faster* relative to a clock on the surface.

@Eric A — It’s not the gravitational pull (g) that matters, it’s the gravitational potential. The deeper you are in a gravity well, the slower your clock ticks. Despite the reduction in g, it takes more energy top get out of a well the deeper it is; you just can’t use gh/c^2 as an approximation.

Relative to a clock on the ground, a clock in an airplane goes faster due to the altitude, but slower due to the velocity. Which effect is bigger?

It depends on the plane. The famous Hafele and Keating experiment with atomic clocks on planes had the two effects being of comparable size. For the westbound clocks, they add to give a significant increase, while they have opposite signs for eastbound flights, and gave a small net decrease.

Cute. One of the more obscure issues with the EP, is what happens to a free-falling charge. The charge is in free-fall, in it’s own RF there is no acceleration, “no gravity” (but some tidal field dep. on circumstances.) Suppose the charge is either orbiting the earth (Chiao’s paradox) or in my example here and there (actually predating that other one), it falls back and forth in a diameter tunnel in Earth etc. (SHM from the changing g.) Well, in that case the local E field changes and their should be EM radiation.

But w/o felt gravity (from inertial accelerometer, not to be confused with dot dot of coordinate position), there is no basis for Lorentz-Abraham radiative self force to oppose the motion. Hence it looks like “free energy.” This is still argued about. The supposed explanation involves the charge getting back EM waves diverted by the gravity field but that strains my credibility. Heard of this, any ideas?

To clarify: the reason the east- and westbound clocks had a different sign is that the surface of the earth is not in an inertial frame, and the comparisons were made to a clock ensemble on the earth (at the US Naval Observatory).

For a proper special relativity analysis the speeds must be measured with respect to an inertial observer, e.g. at rest with respect to the earth but not spinning. So the ground clock is moving to the east. Flying east means you are going faster than the ground clock, and your clock slows down relative to it. Going west means you have slowed down, and the clock speeds up.

Very good article and very well explained. BUT, (yes there is often a “but”), you’ve got it wrong about the observed red and blue shifts. When we look up, we see blueshift because our clocks are slower than the light source and the frequency cycles complete before our unit of time has fully passed. Similarly, when we look down, we see redshift because our clock is faster than the ground based light source and the frequency cycles are too slow to complete in our faster time cycles.
Also, you got the experience wrong. When your clock is slower or faster, either due to gravity or speed, you don’t notice and everything stays normal within your frame of reference. If you look out of your moving porthole for instance, the rest of the universe is passing by temporally faster than you. Or, if you prefer, when you look down on Earth from geostationary orbit, the whole Earth is living slower than you, but you feel the same, quite normal. Even your electrons still spin around at the same speed as before within your frame, but they do so slower than all those on Earth.

Of course, the time spent contriving to spend time at or below sea level would wipe out the nanoseconds “saved” – and indeed waste many hours, ending in a HUGE net loss of time available to enjoy life.

Artor, it isn’t relevant and you don’t see a connection because there isn’t one. It’s blogspam, whose whole point is the hyperlink on “veena singh”‘s name. (Either in the hope that someone will be stupid enough to follow it, or to get extra Google page-rank — the latter won’t actually work for technical reasons, but blogspammers aren’t always clueful enough to know that.)

The same goes for angelalyons26 @16, of course, but that one’s rather more blatant.

As g notes, #13 is a spam comment that snuck past the filters. I usually delete these quickly, but I spent the weekend visiting family in the Land of No Broadband, and was not going to attempt to delete comments from my phone. Since it’s become a topic of discussion, I’ll just edit it to remove the link, because spammers suck, and even trivial victories should be denied them.

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing